Minor Snowfall Tonight

Classic weather words like Nor'easter enter the weather headlines this upcoming week. In fact, it's interesting to note that the light snow tonight is part of a low pressure system that will be slipping by to our south and then merging into a strong storm as it rides up the atlantic seaboard into the northeast. This will become the nor'easter that could have big impacts on ground and air travel for the first couple days of next week.

However, as this storm's center passes south of our area, we're just getting brushed with spotty light snow. Most of this will fall from 3 to 8am Sunday morning. Snowfall amounts should be at an inch of less as this passes by.

This is the last week of January and we're also passing the historically coldest time of the year. Tomorrow our average high and low temperature in the city of Milwaukee will top out at 29° and 16°, respectively.  Our forecast this last week will see most days at or slightly above normal. Until we hit Friday and Saturday where temps only reach the low and middle 20s and lows slip to the teens and then single-digits. So January looks to end on a cold note.

There is some good news though moving forward. That last week of January will give us 18 more minutes on our daylight, with ten minutes just on the sunset alone.

We have a few snow chances left this month coming Monday, Thursday and Saturday.  At this point none of these look to be major storms, so it's quite likely we'll still be monitoring a bit of a snow drought.  The Meteorological Winter runs December through February. As of tonight we've only received 11.6\" of snow this winter. The normal amount to date is just over twenty-two inches. That leaves us 10.6\" behind on snowfall so far this season. By the end of February we average 35.1\" of snowfall. The month of February averages about 9.8\" of snow.  So... unless we get that plus another foot of snow, we'll continue to run below average and possibly close out the winter with below average snowfall.

If you remember, when NOAA put out the winter outlook, there was indication that our area would experience below average precipitation, and so far we've been seeing that trend play out here in southern Wisconsin.

I'm meteorologist Rebecca Schuld

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